Vaid and Gupta (2002) also interpreted their results on Devanagari, a widely used
orthography for Indian languages, as supporting a partly syllabic and partly
phonemic level of segmentation. Devanagari has misaligned vowels, whereby
vowels can precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence there is a
mismatch between the spoken and written sequence. A processing cost was found
for misaligned vowels in Devanagari in Hindi speakers (Vaid & Gupta, 2002).
Aligned words were named significantly faster than misaligned words, in particular
the severely misaligned words. Furthermore, children produced the most errors in
naming and writing words with severe misalignment of vowels, and the naming
errors revealed the influence of spatial placement of vowels rather than the temporal
order, as children typically placed the vowel /i/ after the first consonant rather than
before the second consonant, e.g. saying /masij(a)d/ for /masjid/.